I overslept slightly, and thought I would have to rush down the drive to open the rabbit gate for the postman before remembering that it was a bank holiday, and there wouldn't be any post. We'll probably get confused now about the recycling on Wednesday, and forget that the bin men won't come until Friday. The rabbit gate is not intended to exclude burglars, only bunnies, and the postman could theoretically open it himself since it isn't locked, but it seems unreasonable to expect him to get out of his van to hook it back. If either of us are around when the van draws up outside the kitchen we generally rush out and take the letters to save him even having to walk to the front door, partly to be nice and partly to store up goodwill against the day when we don't manage to open the gate in time. Saturdays are the worst, since for some reason the post is earlier that day than any other, often here by quarter past eight.
There was no rush to get up in the absence of the postman, apart from the chickens locked in their box and the cats' breakfast, because it was raining. It went on raining all day, and by teatime the Systems Administrator said we'd had half an inch. That's a lot by our standards, since our annual total is only about twenty-one inches. That's less than twice what they get in the south of Morocco, according to a magazine article I was reading about a Moroccan garden.
Looking on the bright side, we were not motoring back through Harwich harbour and up the river Orwell in the rain, after a night time North Sea crossing punctuated by vicious showers and thunderstorms, which is how we spent quite a few August Bank Holidays over the years, and I didn't have to spend the day working at the plant centre, where Monday used to be one of my days. I didn't mind bank holiday working per se, since we normally try to visit places on some other day when they'll be less busy, and I liked it better once another part timer who kept the books for her husband's small business explained to the owner that she was legally obliged to pay part time staff double rates since salaried staff who worked on bank holidays got a day off in lieu. But wet days always dragged at the plant centre, once working outside became impossible and you were reduced to ghastly tasks that had nothing to do with plants, like polishing the glass shelves in the shop, while the owner radiated anger and disappointment that the weather was bad for takings. Actually, faced with a choice between the glass shelves and the anger and disappointment, and putting my waterproofs on and standing outside weeding pots, I'd go for the pots, unless it was raining very hard indeed.
Instead I have been reading through more old gardening magazines, prior to packing them in boxes in date order and storing them down in the garage for future reference, and considering things that need doing in the garden. I already knew that the back of the Eleagnus x ebbingei hedge needed taking back hard, now that the front has more or less recovered, and that the Cryptomeria japonica 'Elegans' in the sloping bed needed to come out, since it is no longer elegant and the view from the dining table will be considerably better without it. Both operations would yield some useful planting space, and the magazines contained a few ideas for plants that should grow happily here, and whose style would suit the garden, but the main tack of my thinking was on what to remove or reduce.
Glancing up every so often at the little oak, which more than two decades after we moved in is no longer so little, I have been considering how much to reduce one low hanging branch so as to restore circulation round the garden without looking too brutal and depriving the SA of a favourite place to put the deckchair on hot evenings while minding the chickens. And in a sudden fit of insight I realised that Coronilla varia probably had to go from the central bed in the back garden. If I can salvage some roots I could unleash it on a dry, problem area by the entrance, where drought tolerant large scale ground cover would be useful, and it can fight it out with Euphorbia cyparissus, but it is too rampant a spreader by far for the island bed, and a waste of a relatively sheltered and sunny spot. I could grow something more choice there, and still have room for the Coronilla somewhere else, if I wanted it. The bees love it, and it flowers for a long time.
It's a good exercise as a garden matures to take time out from dashing around doing things, and think about the bigger picture. For the first few years the space seemed so vast, and the gaps between the newly planted shrubs so dauntingly large, and the soil and meagre rainfall so hostile, that I was dreadfully glad of almost anything that wasn't a weed and would grow. Fast forward a dozen years and the once tiny shrubs are touching. There are plants that have gone past their best, and areas where I planted too close because I didn't believe things would ever grow that much, or I was greedily trying to shoehorn in some coveted plant. So I didn't entirely mind that it was raining. Time spent planning is not necessarily wasted.
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